


Beard The Lion In His Den

by DesertScribe



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Post-Canon, Stanford Pines's A+ Lab Safety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-23 04:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11395158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Stan is bored enough to go see what Ford is doing in his lab.  He might not stay bored for long.





	Beard The Lion In His Den

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoseWithAllHerThorns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseWithAllHerThorns/gifts).



"Hey, Ford," Stan said, poking his head around the corner to peek into Ford's makeshift lab, "you doin' anything interesting in here?" They might not own the Mystery Shack anymore, but Soos was happy to let them spend the first part of the summer there until construction on their new home was complete. Only a few weeks back on dry land, and Ford had already taken over the building's sub-levels, populating them with a whole new batch of nerd machines as if he had never left.

Usually Stan did not come down here, but he had a few hours to kill and didn't want to risk watching any more telenovelas with Abuelita Ramirez after their last argument over who made a better suitor for Maria on _El Viejo Y El Irritable_. Apparently the divide between Team Jorge, the darkly handsome bad boy with a racecar, and Team Dr. DeSantos, the silver fox surgeon with a mysterious past, was deep enough to make the usually placid woman threaten to stab Stan in the liver with her vacuum cleaner wand when he voiced support for the wrong side. She was _probably_ just joking, but Stan had been stabbed enough times in his life to not want to risk it.

Stan had considered passing the time with a snack, but Soos was trying to slim down to fit into some of Stan's old suits, which really took the fun out of the Shack's private selection of junk food. There had not been much of interest in the refrigerator besides some unlabeled mason jars full of green stuff that smelled like kiwi fruit, green apples, and a hint of pipe tobacco, and Mabel liked Stan to ask first before drinking her Mabel Juice. Besides that, there wasn't so much as a Pitt Cola or bag of Chippackers to be found in the kitchen, just healthy stuff. Yuck.

Soos himself was upstairs being Mr. Mystery. The kid (well, not really a kid anymore, damn Stan was getting old) had settled into the role with aplomb, but he was still at that unfortunate stage where any time Stan tried to watch him work, Soos started worrying that Stan wanted to take back the Shack and the job title and so he'd turn into a nervous mess, which was bad for business. Stan kinda did want to take it all back, just because he missed having a steady stream of willing rubes to fleece, but he wouldn't do that to Soos. Maybe the two of them could work out a deal that would let Stan get his kicks playing to a crowd again without it threatening Soos's sense of stability, but until then Stan needed to stay out of the museum half of the Shack.

Stan couldn't even pass the time with any of the kids who were still actually kids, because Dipper and Wendy were both working shifts in the gift shop while Mabel had disappeared off to parts unknown after getting a call from her friends. Hence the need to bother Ford for entertainment purposes.

Ford barely spared Stan a glance, but at least he was willing to talk while he worked on whatever it was that he was doing, something with a microscope and fizzy green goo that smelled like kiwifruit, green apples, and just a hint of pipe tobacco. "I'm working on winning a wager with Fiddleford. He bet me that I couldn't learn how to use a stick shift with my beard like he did, so I am going to prove him wrong."

"You could have just said no," Stan said. He turned to go then turned back to the lab again when a thought struck him. "Wait a minute."

"A minute waited is a minute wasted, Stan," Ford said. He added another drop of green goo to the microscope slide he was looking at. It let out a puff of pink smoke made a sound almost like a whole lot of very tiny, very high pitched voices saying, "Yippee!" Stan really hoped that last part was just his hearing aids acting up again, so he ignored it and pressed on with his original thought. 

"Yeah, whatever," Stan said as he stepped all the way into the room this time. He did not step too far in, though, because Ford's experiments tended to have a splash zone, and this one looked like it might be sticky. "But seriously, you just shaved this morning, and by 'shaved,'" Stan made air quotes around the word, "I mean you set your face on fire because using something as ordinary as a razor isn't science-y enough for you. And when you think about it, shouldn't shaving be _more_ science-y than burning your hair off, because humans probably invented razors more recently than they invented fire, am I right?

Ford sighed and used his thumb and forefinger to massage the point where his glasses rested against the bridge of his nose. "Stan," he began grumpily.

"Okay, forget the history question, because I don't really care about that part anyway. What I'm trying to get at here is that you're gonna need to wait, like, at least a year and probably way more before you get any kind of a beard you can wrap around something, and even if you already had one, you don't exactly look like you're doing gearshift practice in here."

"Of course I don't have a beard yet, Stanley. That's the part I'm working on right now. I merely need to fine tune this follicle growth stimulation formula a little more, and I should have a fully prehensile beard by dinnertime. Then it's just a simple matter of doing some repetitive exercises until I've established the neural pathways you would call muscle memory, and it will be between the sixteenth and nineteenth easiest bet I've ever won." He added a few more drops of the green goo to the microscope slide. This time the puff of smoke was purple, the tiny voices shouted, "Woohoo!" and suddenly a fluffy wad of brown hair sprouted from the slide and engulfed the whole lower half of the microscope. Ford looked up long enough to gesture triumphantly at the hairball. "Honestly, I can't really believe that Fiddleford thought it would be all that much of a challenge for me." He sounded almost disappointed.

"Wait, you're telling me you're making a hair growth formula? This is great, Ford! After all these years, you've finally picked a project that'll make some money!"

"Not that much money," Ford said with a shrug. "The bet was only for ten dollars."

Stan rolled his eyes heavenward and groaned in exasperation, no, more than exasperation, pain to the very depths of his being, because the entrepreneurial part of Stan's soul felt like someone had just kicked it. Ford, of course, looked oblivious to Stan's distress.

"At least it's a start," Stan said when he finally felt he was once again capable of talking without crying. "So, uh, is there anything I can do to help?"

"That depends, Stanley," Ford said, writing something in his lab notes. "How many college degrees do you have in biochemistry, and do any of them focus on epigenetics?"

"None," Stan said, because of course he didn't waste his time studying biochemistry for the fun of it. He had hated biology class, and he had hated chemistry class, and anything that combined those two things into a single name was probably ten times as boring.

Stan _had_ picked up a couple of undergraduate degrees in physics and engineering over the years, because it had been hard to turn a profit with the Shack in the off season back during that first decade and any second-rate college in the country had been all too happy to cough up a full ride scholarship including room and board for the great genius 'Stanford Pines' without any questions, background checks, or so much as bothering to count fingers. BS-ing his way through all that homework without Ford's help had been a major pain in the neck, but it had kept him from starving in the winters before he learned how to con larger numbers of people into driving to Roadkill County, Oregon and throwing money at him all year round. And if, in the nearly a year since returning to this dimension, his nerdy brother still hadn't noticed that he was getting alumni magazines from more schools than he should remember attending, then great, because that was just one less time Stan needed to justify his actions to anyone.

"But," Stan added cheerily, because he might not want to get into another argument with Ford over misappropriating identities but he didn't want to look like a completely useless knucklehead either, "I learned how to cook meth back in the eighties, and a test tube is a test tube, right?"

Ford's eye twitched, but he did not look up from continuing to scribble his lab notes. "I think the best way for you to help," he said, "is by staying out of the way." He made a vague shooing gesture in the direction of the door with his free hand.

"Fine," Stan grumbled. "I didn't really want to spend any more time down in this depressing hole anyway." He took a few deep breaths and forced himself to unclench his jaw, because gritting his dentures together like that wasn't good for them or for his gums. When the grinding noise stopped, Stan thought he could hear all those tiny voices shouting, "Wheeeee!" He looked at the source of the sound, and his eyes went wide. Was it his imagination, or was the microscope still getting hairier? "Uh, Ford, what's the opposite of whatever you called your green stuff?"

"You mean the follicle growth stimulation formula?" Ford asked, _still_ not looking up. "I suppose that would some kind of follicle growth inhibitor formula. Why do you ask?"

"Because you're probably going to want to make some of that too, and soon," Stan said, backing out of the lab, no longer needing any urging from Ford to do so.

Ford finally followed the direction of Stan's gaze and noticed that the hair had fully covered the microscope and was creeping towards the flask full of green goo. His eyes went wide. "Oh sweet Moses," he whispered before snarling, "Knock it off you guys!" at whatever he had been feeding the formula to.

The multitude of tiny voices only laughed louder.

"I mean it," Ford shouted. "Don't make me go get the curling irons!"

Stan did not wait around to see how the still-growing hair responded to this threat, because he was already running for the elevator. Maybe he could find Mabel and her friends and see if they needed an adult accomplice for whatever they were doing. Even getting a makeover from them would be better than this, because at least with that he would know exactly who the giggling was coming from.

**The End**


End file.
